Nuclear power is not half-baked, it's corrupted. The powers that be co-opted it for nuclear weapons programs. We chose to invest exclusively in war-time applications while pretending to seek peacetime uses.

Only now are we going back and looking at solutions that don't create ingredients for fission and fission-fusion warheads, and the lack of progress there means that countries who we don't want to join the nuclear arm's race are in a prickly position because the nuclear plants they can build leave them with ingredients the UN doesn't really want to proliferate.